Anatomy of an Inside Joke

Hopefully the people that have interacted with me a good deal have figured out that I’m not serious a lot. In fact, most of the time I am joking around. This probably has something to do with my family, we’re always doing crazy stuff, and I’m ok with that. This has lead to a lot of inside jokes for my family and I. Now I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I’m not the only person that has inside jokes, but I do have some shared inside jokes. Since I was actually part of making something funny at the time it occurred at some point in my life, I know a little about the process. For me, it normally starts with a serious statement, even though it can be a sort of commentary on how the world is viewed, it is normally said in a serious fashion. A lot of the time the phrase that makes up the core of the joke is silly in and of itself, which can lead to an initial bout of laughter. But then, after everything that has lead up to the key sentence, it finally sinks in and people laugh at the sheer absurdity of the idea. And many times, at the end, people are just laughing because other people are laughing. You see them laughing and remember how funny the joke was, then you’re laughing, then you see them again and somehow that’s funny again… and if you do it right, this one simple, often silly, joke can keep you laughing for years (not continuously though, because that would be bad). And nobody else will think that it is as funny as the people that were there that initially started the joke, in fact most people won’t think it is funny at all. They’re all left outside your inside joke.

So Scott Thought.

Backwards English, Backwards

Have you ever noticed that the English language is sort of geared to make us, the people that use it, think or say or write one thing as opposed to another? For example, if somebody wasn’t being truthful, they would be a liar. But what would they be if they weren’t a liar? You might first be tempted to say they would be honest, but that’s not quite right. I can say somebody is a liar, but I can’t say somebody is an honest. It might be my lack of command of the language that I call my native tongue, but the only equivalent I can think of for liar is truth teller. Now why would we want it so that the word which we (or at least I) would like to use less (liar) is only one word, where as the word(s) with the good connotation (truth teller) is two words? It just seems to me that it would be better if it was easier to say good things and harder to say bad things, not the other way around.

So Scott Thought.

Toaster Strudel vs. Pop Tarts

 I think toaster strudels are doing a little bit of over advertizing. Now I’m no marketing expert, for that you would have to talk to my brother, but I think their ads against pop tarts are a bad idea. They start off by showing what clearly looks exactly like a pop tart and calling an other breakfast pastry or fruit pastry or something. Then they inject fruit goo into the middle which plumps it up a bit, and wrap it all up in flaky doughy pastry. First, if you actually took a pop tart, then added gooey goodness to the middle and wrapped it all up, I would think that deserved a taste. That, however is not what a toaster strudel is. A toaster strudel is everything they say it is, without the original pop tart looking thing. It is gooey middle with flaky pastry outside and frosting to top it. If we take a second to think about this, a pop tart and a toaster strudel, if they are even in the same family, are on opposite sides of each other. A pop tart has a compressed, packed dough outside with a (more or less) solid filling, and an already hardened icing top. Toaster strudels have a light, airy pastry outside with a gooey liquid center, and a fresh icing top. They are so different, my desire for each of these is not related whatsoever to my desire for the other. But now that I think about it, they probably would make a pretty good breakfast if they were combined…

So Scott Thought.

Super Villians Rule

Super villains are sometimes way cooler than the superheroes that they fight whom we so commonly root for to win the aforementioned fight. A bunch of superheroes have really weak ways of getting their powers, and as a result, go through almost no trials. For example, superman was born with his powers and had to do nothing to get them, as opposed to Two Face, who gets sulfuric acid splashed in his face, then has to build himself into a villain. It just seems that the villain way of life (building a name for yourself) is more impressive than the hero way (having powers be given to you). Also, villains can be way more creative, in the ways that they torture their respective superheroes.

So Scott Thought.

Hat History

Now I’m not going to say I’m a hat expert, in fact I had the good fortune to learn a little more about hats (and the world) recently when my mom, and then later that night, our waitress, correctly identified a millinery as a women’s hat shop. So I’m not a hat expert, but I am an enthusiast and great hat wearer. I can’t quite recall when I decided I wanted to do this, but at some early point in my educational career, I decided to wear a hat to school. Now for a long time kids weren’t allowed to wear hats in school, so when I say I wore a hat to school, I literally mean on the way to and from school (and like every other waking moment of my life not in school). I liked hats. I really liked wearing hats. In accordance with this I actually wore the hat right up until the school day actually started, sort of as an act of defiance (that was about as defiant as I ever got), but mostly just because I liked wearing my hat. Also, for a long time I liked to use hat to express my enthusiasm for my team. Enter ninth grade, the hat ban is lifted and now I get to wear my hat all the time! Now this brings up a new problem: consider if you will, wearing a hat pretty much from the time you wake up until you go to sleep (sometimes past that) it tends to get pretty dirty. So I came up with a rule for myself, one new hat a year, meaning every hat I had was the only one worn for a year, then it was retired. More recently, I’ve gotten an interest in hair, namely my own hair on my head because it’s awesome. Normally, if my hair wasn’t so long, I would be wearing a hat. This derives from the pure satisfaction I get from wearing a hat, whereas the new trend derives from the fact that I now care more about how my hair looks than about wearing a hat. So like I said, I’m no hat expert, but I sure do have a lot of experience with them.

Scott hat stats:
Favorite practical reason to wear a hat: to cover up ugly in-between hair that isn’t long enough to be a flowing mane but isn’t short enough to look good either
Scott’s number one used hat type: the baseball cap (bonus, my favorite variety is fitted)
Number one thing featured on my hats: university of Michigan
Number two: university of Wisconsin
Rising trend: winter hats/beanies
Trend that should come back: top hats

So Scott Thought.

Religious Math

This is an old thought:

I could definitely see math becoming a religion, believing all things that had happened could all be shown to happen with math, trying to use equations to predict the future with equations, and looking for the one true ultimate equation that would be the solution to everything and mix the entirety of everything all together in one big lump. Yep, I could definitely see math being a religion.

So Scott Thought. 

How I Met Lampy the Bean

I have a friend named Lampy the Bean. Admittedly Lampy has not always been his name, it’s a nickname that my mom inadvertently gave to him, but that comes later. So here’s the story of how I met Lampy, and like any good story, it starts in Mexico. It was about five years past now when my family and I were on a vacation in Mexico for my grandparents’ anniversary, and thus it was a nice family vacation. One day, however, we decided to go looking for a “real” Mexican place (because apparently being located in Mexico isn’t enough to call it a “real” Mexican restaurant). Eventually we found a place that looked like it would have good food but was in a place that didn’t make us fear for our lives too much. We get in and we’re served dinner, the meal is winding down and I’m at the table with my oldest cousin Bob and there’s a pepper on my plate. So naturally, Bob tries to get me to eat the pepper and he offers me a one peso coin. At first this seemed like a good idea, but I decided I wasn’t that easy and I would hold out for more, plus after a quick conversion I realized it was only ten cents. A short while later he had doubled his offer to two pesos. I agreed, the terms were set, and we had a deal. I ate the pepper and shortly thereafter believed I had won out because it wasn’t too hot, when all of the sudden it started to burn. I quickly downed two or three waters because of course all the food was gone (meal winding down, remember) and had slightly lessened the degree of the burning at the cost of some spreading. Moments later as we were leaving, we found out that each glass of water had cost extra… oops. Naturally, years down the road my cousin remembers this and introduced me to my friend Lampy on, or very near to, my birthday I think. Last summer I felt an extra special connection to Lampy and consequently he was around a lot more often. When my mom saw Lampy she would always call him the bean plant. What about that bean plant over there? When are you going to take that to college? Then as we were traveling to drop me off at the airport to go to college while he was in the car, my mom again misnamed him and just called him Lampy. We already thought the bean plant was such a funny name when I said Lampy the bean, it just stuck. That’s how I met my magnificent ghost pepper plant, Lampy the Bean plant. And now I would like to issue a challenge to my cousin, Bob: once I have grown peppers, I want you to have one with me and write a review on your blog.

So Scott thought.